From the son of Adam and Eve to an all-devouring deity. Ganesha in early modern European culture

KWIATKOWSKI, NICOLÁS

Gante

Conferencia; Performing Theatricality and imaging religious ceremonies in early modern Western Europe; 2024

Universiteit Gent

In 1558, Pedro de Almeida wrote a letter in which he described a ceremony honouring “Ganessa”, “Vinachoti” or “Vinaico”, the elephant-headed Hindu deity. Two years later, Luís Fróis penned another account, containing the myth of Ganesha’s birth and identifying his parents, Shiva and Parvati, with Adam and Eve. De Almeida and Fróis were Jesuits writing from Goa, and these were, perhaps, the earliest representations of Ganesha for a European audience. In 1615, Lorenzo Pignoria quoted Fróis verbatim and the story was included, with an illustration, in his Immagini degli dei indiani, an addendum to Vincenzo Cartari’s Imagini degli Dei degli antichi. According to Pignoria, the “fable” is “very beautiful and one could believe to have dreamt a similar story, but never something so improper”. More than a century later, Jean-Fréderic Bernard and Bernard Picart provided a thorough description of diverging versions of Ganesha’s myth (“Quenavady” in their transcription of “Ganapati”) and of some ceremonies associated to it. Fróis’ and Pignoria’s brevity became a plethora of information, compiled from diverse sources, including Jesuit letters (Bouchet) and travel accounts (Rogerius, Van Spielbergen). The Cérémonies ascribes an auspicious character to the elephant-headed god, but accounts also for the gruesome legend of a deity that lives in a sea of sugar and devours everything that is put in his way. Bernard and Picart interpret this variety as a sign of the Indians’ “idées fort confuses de ces matières”. My contribution will attempt to trace the representations of Ganesha in Western Europe from Fróis and Pignoria to Bernard and Picart. I will address the difficulties in cultural translation of ceremonies and religious beliefs in early modern Europe and attempt to provide a contextual explanation of the distance between “improper dreams” and “confused ideas”.